You need to purge your government of the selfish, the cruel and the corrupt. It doesn't matter what form of organization you choose if you don't keep the assholes out of power.
See... That the problem, the quote that best comes to mind is.
" The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. "
-Douglas Adams
Make it a small council, 3 to 5 people chosen at random from a pool limited to those with some list of qualifications. Make it a point system based on academic, civic, and business success. Those that have enough points are automatically in the pool.
Business success does not belong on that list. Giving capital interests a seat at the table is how we got and continue to be here.
Business success is a skill, and knowledge set, that's crucial to the economy, without which the US wouldn't be a global leader. The point of having multiple skill set leaders on a small council is to prevent the 'business above all else' mind set from prevailing, while also making sure needed expertise is at the table.
Start with an automatic retirement age; no one over the age of 65 (for example) can serve as an elected representative.
Honestly, the same should likely apply to voter eligibility - to be honest - but that’s a whole separate argument for another time.
Yeah, and while we’re at it let’s disenfranchise the intellectually disabled as well. /sarcasm
Personally I prefer term limits rather than an age cap because I’d rather see government represent everyone. If a 75-year-old manages to win an election by running a successful campaign, why shouldn’t they govern? But if they’re only in office because they ran unchallenged for 30 years… time to make room for change.
The biggest issue with term limits is that it transfers agency away from elected officials, and empowers unelected staffers who will instead be the ones with all of the institutional knowledge on ‘how things are done’ - further entrenching the rot.
By instead having an age restriction, it still allows for popular politicians to remain within Congress and transfer experience to newer members, while also incentivising politicians to plan long-term and focus on bettering things for future generations, as they will ultimately be the ones responsible for looking after things. After all, "a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under."
We have a great case study in how effective term limits are at achieving good governance: California. It's just as @thatKamGuy said-- it empowers party bureaucracies, advisors and civil servants at the expense of elected legislators.
California's governance did improve, but largely due to structural reforms to the budgeting process pushed through when Jerry Brown was governor. Term limits are a band-aid that doesn't even stick properly.
Because if you're not going to be around to see the consequences of the policies you supported maybe you shouldn't be taking part in it.
We don't let children take part in the policies being made even though they will change their entire lives, but we do it because they aren't informed enough for such decisions. Well guess what? Children are often smarter than people who are sun downing and while an old person only gets dumber as the years pass a child gets smarter.
if you’re not going to be around to see the consequences of the policies you supported maybe you shouldn’t be taking part in it
For example, if you're termed out and leaving someone else to clean up your mess?
Our material conditions haven’t deteriorated enough yet
I love how most of the replies here are people spitballing ideas for fixing the government, as if there weren't a bunch of nations who have already solved these problems which we could take inspiration from. Basically every democracy that was founded after us has looked at our mistakes and fixed them in one way or another.
On a similar note, we need to boost SCOTUS to 29 or 31. The party membership of the court shouldn't be so tight that one bad faith president can negatively impact American policy for the next half century.
29 justices, with rolling term limits, so every president gets to appoint a few, but not enough to screw the results.
Judges shouldn't have political affiliations in the first place.
I read the article, but don't follow the argument. Add some seats, and then each representative will represent fewer voters. So what? How does that fix gerrymandering or make elections more representative?
The easiest solution is of course proportional representation. Can't gerrymander if there are no districts.
But if you must have districts for some reason, then... just don't put politicians in charge of drawing them.
To try and understand how/why adding additional seats to Congress would be a positive change (or really, ANY proposal) - take the most extreme ends of the spectrum:
With 1 single seat, 50.1% of voters would get 100% of the representation.
With 1 seat for every voter, 50.1% of voters would get 50.1% of the representation.
Obviously, not EVERY single person can be a congressman - so the goal should be to find the minimum number of representatives required to optimally represent the populace.
More representatives means more districts. More districts means smaller districts. The smaller the district the harder it is to gerrymander. If you take this to the extreme, a district is one person and that person is the representative, there is no gerrymandering and you’d have a true democracy.
We'll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood
Also it would allow for more specific representation. Using myself as an example, my district is basically my county plus a couple small parts of some neighboring counties. One end of the county is pretty rural, the other half butts up against a major city and pretty much just bleeds right into it. We have some ridiculously wealthy old money areas, and we have some that look like they were plucked from a movie about gang violence. There's a few towns here that I've legitimately never even had to drive through. It's kind of insane that all of these different areas are being represented by the same person, we have very different and sometimes conflicting concerns. And if I needed to go to my representatives office for any reason, I'd have to drive about an hour to get there because of course she's set up shop at the far end of the county from me.
Personally, I think the ideal way to draw districts is to kind of have voters do it when they vote. Give them a map, have them select the areas where they live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or have other connections to until they've selected an area with a big enough population to be a district. Then feed those maps into a computer and have it average them all together to generate the new district map.
When you say proportional representation--is that to say the number of representatives per state is decided by the population level? If so that sounds great.
But without districts and candidates therein, how would you determine who is voting for what?
Congress should be huge like the writer says, but also chosen at random like jury duty.
Every January, NYE, the ball drops...and 10,000 new names are chosen. They're sworn in a few weeks later, when we used to swear in the new President.
No fund-raising, no campaigning, just 10,000 Americans of all walks of life, set together to steer the ship.
This is fraught with problems, but just to make my point: those potential jurors go through the selection process where they are whittled down. Conflicts of interest, bias, and more are all taken into consideration.
There’s also the fact that many Americans are just idiots. A not insignificant number of people legitimately believe the earth is flat.
Yeah randomness has been used effectively in the past but typically not that broad. Adding some chance to the process can be a good thing though as it limits the impact of corruption.
Oh absolutely, I don’t mean to say there is zero merit to the idea. It could absolutely be worked into a better solution than is currently in place in pretty much any country.
That leaves a huge amount of power to the "random" selection algorithm and any other eligibility rules.
Computers cannot be random, true.
Humans cannot be "random", true.
Things outside of Human and Computers control, "random" to us. E.g. Lava Lamps.
We have ways of "randomly" selecting people, and we also have ways of not throwing non-eligible people in the hat. A couple of non-eligible people in 10,000 isn't going to matter if at least 5001 people are eligible and competent.
Now are humans capable of letting this happen "randomly" is another story
"Let's keep all the existing problems slightly repackaged and create new ones." -VP at a Think Tank
No wonder we're in so much trouble. With friends like this who needs enemies. Better solution:
No more geographic attachment for the House. Proportional representation time. In 1776, local concerns were much more distinct. Now, Anywhere USA is everywhere. Plus, Senators are still bound to states for people who worry about that. Instead, parties win seats based on a percentage of the vote they receive and can assign members (which they do already, just with more steps) as they see fit. Gerrymandering solved, also we just broke the terrible de facto 2 party system.
That's OK-ish sounding but I'm going to give the example of NY. NYC is a very different animal from the northern part of the state and local issues matter a great deal depending on which portion you live in. I imagine it's like that in other very large states and major cities in general.
I think perhaps there should be some accounting for population centers. Major cities simply have different concerns from rural areas, and it seems reasonable to have each be represented. But we may be getting into a "where does it stop" thing here.
I'm not sure how to skin that cat or if it's worth skinning. I generally agree with your proposal - the way it's currently done is absurd.
We have local and state governments. Focusing on these minor differences at the federal level made less and less sense with the industrial revolution, rail, telegraph, highway system, internet. I'm not sure where exactly we crossed over from valid governance to outdated system to absurd, but we're definitely there.
Also, these differences tend to be overblown which is why people, politicians speak about them in the vaguest of terms. Yes, when comparing a large city to hill people there might be some differences (though again, far less than historically). However, we're at the federal level and big city to big city and hill people to hill people it's all more or less Anywhere, USA.
Having a district cross a state border will be a problem when a Rep has to navigate two separate state governmental systems when trying to access help for their constituents.
Making the granularity finer doesn't do anything to resolve the underlying structural and governance problems.
Yes it does!
It's much harder to herd 10,000 cats than it is 100. Those in power who play defense for the status quo will definitely notice the difference.
In 1787 the population of the country was : 4Million. With roughtly 250,001 being able to vote. 250,001.
The current voting population 250,000,000
250 THOUSAND to 250 MILLION -- a THOUSAND times more Voters. A THOUSAND Time MORE voters.
Get rid of the parties and just have a government of the people. Vote on issues, not for people.
The US started that way. They ended up having parties again almost immediately.
The FF tried that and it immediately failed, leaving us with a system ill equipped to handle political parties.
FF?
Founding Fathers
I'm not necessarily sold on the idea that reps of a given state should only be responsible for a very small subsection of people who are likely poorly informed. Just thinking of my own representative, who won against a progressive based entirely on name recognition rather than policy, it seems abundantly clear that money can easily touch all races whereas educated voters and advocacy may not exist in enough districts to be meaningful. Money can, and in quantities above the median income with ease.
After reading the article, I think there's a inherent assumption that more means harder to gerrymander, but every republican gerrymandering recently released is computer generated. What would prevent them from arguing the districts of densely black areas thinly sliced from urban areas and then expanded out to suburbs is legal? When computer modeling and accurate voter information is supplied the possibilities of gerrymandering are not remotely hampered by increased resolution of the electoral maps. The districting will come to head with the notion that the same district even be contiguous. Do you trust SCOTUS to affirm it needs to be?
I'd argue that it is a lot easier to inform the public when the campaign doesn't have to cover as much area and that it becomes more difficult to buy every race when there are more of them.
The entire electoral system that is based on a popularity contest is just really broken. It's a testament to how perfectly "broken" the American electoral system is that we are still using an electoral system created for a 13 colony slave based society made to favor rich land owners.
I say "broken" because it's really not. It's actually very well written to ensure the system favors the power of the ruling class over the masses. What we are seeing now is the confidence of that class raising to such a high degree that they are no longer pretending that they have maintain that illusion.
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